Standard solution for displaying messages either on shell or with window managers gui

Question

Is there a standard solution to display messages from within bash scripts eiter on the commandline if the shell is a login shell or in a new window in the present window manager's GUI? Specifically I am running kde which has the tool kdialog to display messages. However I would prefer a solution which is independent of KDE but uses KDE style if it is running. Also it should allow to ask for user input etc.

Answer 1

For the commandline the standard solution is dialog (1) which allows you to create interactive ncurses based dialogs, i.e:

I think there is no definitive answer for an graphical interface from shell scripts but I consider zenity (1) as the de-facto tool for GUI interactions from the shell. As it is GTK based I am not a 100% sure about KDE themeing but it is possible as far as i know to use the KDE theme in GTK.